Free The Real Real by Emma McLaughlin, Nicola Kraus Page B

requests.
    “Over there.” Melanie points to the front desk. “But I don’t think Kara wants you making calls—”
    “Great, thanks!” I race around the faux-marble console and, ducking down, pound in my home number before anyone can stop me.
    “O’Rourke residence.”
    “I am sooo sorry. This sucks! Do you want to go home?”
    “How? On your skates? My mom dropped me off, remember? She’s doing the night shift at the hospital. And I’m not biking uphill on this ice, so don’t even suggest it.”
    “Right. Crap. Well, we’re finally shooting this thing, so it shouldn’t be that much longer. Do you want to watch the other movie?”
    “And get freaked out by myself?!”
    “Jesse!” Kara booms into the bullhorn, and I stand up 82

    to see the entire spa floor staring at me. “We’re rolling!”
    “What the hell?” Caitlyn says. “Who’s yelling at you in surround sound?”
    “Gotta go. Watch the movie! I’ll be there soon!”
    But soon doesn’t come. Between the humming “daylight,”
    the clocks perma-set to one thirty-two p.m., and the desperate caffeinated perkiness of a room full of professional extras, time has stopped altogether.
    “I’m gonna break out,” Nico listlessly observes from where she reclines on her treatment table. I loll my towel-wrapped head, gazing past Melanie to watch Nico hold up a mirror, inspecting a face that has been cleansed, masqued and then made up along with ours no fewer than eight times.
    “I can’t feel my lips,” I offer to the klieg light that hovers brightly above our three treatment tables, like we’re about to be abducted by the world’s smallest spaceship.
    Mrs. Dubviek may have finally let them knock down a wall between treatment rooms to accommodate the crew lining every peach marbleized inch, but it took her five masques to shut up about it.
    “It’s fine,” Melanie chimes amenably.
    I push myself up on my elbows. “Seriously. How are you so chipper?”
    Nico rolls onto her back, adjusting her terry-cloth robe as she rests her head in the foam doughnut. “That’s just Mel.”

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    “What?” Melanie shrugs. “It’s our job. I mean, better laying here and have this stuff put on than having to be the ones out in the snow waiting to apply it. You two should get magazines.” She lifts the cover of Us Weekly where Miley Cyrus is ducking into something with someone.
    “I get for you.” Mrs. Dubviek uncurls herself from the out-of-frame slipper chair, her crossed arms providing a shelf for her cleavage as she squeezes past the crew in her stocking feet.
    “Okay, girls,” Kara’s disembodied voice booms through the megaphone from the other room, where she’s encamped behind the monitors. Everyone tilts their heads, listening like Caitlyn’s dog when he thinks you said “dinner.” “So here’s where we’re at: The color of the real facial mask is officially not reading, so we’re going to think outside the box on this one. Stand by.”
    Zacheria—no last name, just Zacheria (rhymes with digestive distress)—the award-winning cinematographer and officially my least favorite person ever , steps in with his black leggings and Hezbollah scarf to hold up his hands in a postcard shape while climbing over our tables. “Jenny!”
    he hollers, one knee above my shoulder, the other directly on Melanie’s. Her eyes tear.
    Jenny, the sad, skinny woman who did something really, really bad in a previous life, shoots in with open tubes of . . . toothpaste? wedged between her fingers. “Yes?”
    “You are here .” Zacheria points at Nico’s head, and 84

    Jenny drops to her knees and shimmies between the tables to crouch awkwardly with her face level with Nico’s. Zacheria stares intensely down at both of them. Nico raises one eyebrow, flinching when he grabs one of the tubes from Jenny and, with a flourish, smears the thick turquoise paste directly onto Jenny’s forehead. She smiles as if anointed.
    “I have solved this! The aqueous